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Building loyalty with Drupal

Posted on Wed, Jul 25, 2012 by Ron Pruett

A number of years ago, I had the good fortune of being a client of Loyalty Builders, an innovative analytics company based in beautiful Portsmouth, NH. www.loyaltybuilders.com The company’s customer transaction analytics make it possible to predict customer purchase and loyalty behaviors, target marketing to specific segments, and more. Marketers are increasingly selling their products across multiple platforms and channels and need to select technologies that can expand to their changing needs. The demand for Loyalty-Builders-type services are increasing daily. I was delighted to see that they chose to use Drupal for their website.

Recently, I got an update on business from Jaime O’Neill, the Director of Marketing, and her comments are below.

Tell us about your company – history and mission - Loyalty Builders was founded in 1999 to help businesses gain more revenue from their existing customers. Our customer analytics solution is based on customer transaction data that enable us to predict which customers are ready to buy now, what they are likely to buy, cross-sell and up-sell probabilities, and which customers are in danger of defecting. Further, we can identify marketing strategies for different customer segments and advise which products to offer to each customer. The result is more efficient use of marketing dollars, higher response and retention rates, and increases in revenue.

Who is your main audience?
Our target audience includes Marketing Executives, Database Administrators, CEO’s, CFO’s and COO’s in midmarket and enterprise organizations that currently do direct marketing and are looking to increase response rates and revenue from existing customers.

How is your service used by customers?
We have a SaaS solution called Longbow. Customers start by uploading their transaction data. Using this data Longbow calculates purchase probabilities for products to upsell and cross-sell, as well as a risk score measuring likelihood of a customer's defection. With this rich set of predictive analyses, companies are able to build marketing campaigns targeting each individual customer with a unique offer that dramatically increases response rates and revenue.

Is your service automated or does it require a consultative approach?
One of the things that sets Loyalty Builders apart from our competitors is our strategic account management with a dedicated team approach. Each customer has a marketing specialist, a mathematician, and a data concierge. Our expertise along with the power of our time-tested and proven algorithms is a formula for success. Some of our customers take advantage of these account management resources, while others use the analytics on their own.

What is the competitive landscape?
The large marketing services firms that dominate the competitive landscape focus on customer acquisition marketing while we are entirely focused on existing customers. Our analytics are able to get down to the product level, which is unique to Loyalty Builders. We have proven that utilizing a company’s own transaction data is the best method to help marketers predict future purchases.

What various types of site and mobile or other technology do you use and why?
Our website is run on Drupal technology and Loopfuse is our marketing automation program.

Who internally makes your technology choices?
There are a number of us involved with technology decisions including the CEO, the CTO, and our Chief Mathematics Officer.
Do you have examples of how readers use technology/your site? Our site includes a Sample Size Calculator that enables users to determine if their experiments and results are statistically significant.

How did you start using Drupal?
It was recommended by an outside consultant.

Why did you select Drupal?
There were a couple of compelling reasons including the fact that it is open source, has many developers, and has no vendor and data lock-in.

How do you see your site/offerings evolving over the near and medium terms?
Loyalty Builders has one of the best free online Marketing Resource Libraries in the industry. We want to implement marketing strategies to drive more prospective customers to our content-rich website to help them understand the possibilities and advantages associated with individualized direct marketing.

Is there any advice you could offer our readers who may be facing similar issues with their businesses?
Businesses evolve rapidly, and so do websites. It’s important to use technology that enables internal marketing staff to make website changes without having to turn to a web developer for each new feature or new white paper to be posted to the site.

Comments

Drupal is a popular, free and open source CMS (Content Management
System) platform that powers innumerable websites worldwide and other
web applications....You can use Drupal to build all types of web
property including, personal blogs, social networking sites or any
other enterprise application.... And This is the perfect webpage for
anyone who hopes to find out about this topic. You understand so much
its almost hard to argue with you (not that I actually would want
to…HaHa). You definitely put a brand new spin on a subject
that's been written about for a long time. Excellent stuff, just
wonderful!

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